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Syracuse Common Councilor Khalid Bey answering a question during the panel discussion for the "Stop the Violence" forum at the Landmark Theatre on March 21. Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler is seated on the left and Jim Jennings-Bey of the Trauma Response Team is seated on the right.

We recently attended a forum at the Landmark Theatre billed as a dialogue on violence. The panel included about a dozen individuals, including the mayor, two other local officeholders, an NRA/Boy Scouts of America spokesperson, the chief of police and other law enforcement figures. After each briefly introduced him or herself, and after some brief keynote remarks by a national TV personality who had grown up in a single-parent family in Harlem, there was a question-and-answer session.

All of the audience questions were submitted in writing to the moderator, who then read aloud some of the questions for members of the panel to answer. In the panel’s remarks, three themes stood out:

• The need for more programming for Syracuse youth.
• The need for tougher law enforcement to put pressure on gangs.
• The need for parents to better monitor their children's whereabouts and behavior.

What struck us was how limited the dialogue seemed. The following factors that profound affect local street violence were totally absent from any of the panel's remarks:

• The illegal drug market.
• The poorly regulated small arms industry.
• Mainstream media's focus on violence, both journalistically and entertainment-wise.
• The pervasive and systemic racism ("the new Jim Crow"), which results in more young men of color being incarcerated in our bloated prison system than attending college and university.
• Pervasive and systemic militarism, fostered by certain war-profiteering corporations and by major political parties, which infects several branches of government and the Pentagon. The Pentagon absorbs a grossly disproportionate share of our federal tax money, thus depriving other sectors such as schooling, housing, health and infrastructure, of desperately needed funds.

It certainly doesn’t help that the Pentagon’s overriding illusion is that threat and violence can solve international conflicts of interest. Nor is it any mystery why, in a nation whose president now presides over meetings every Tuesday to select drone assassination targets, so much violence trickles down to our streets.